Needs Are Made, Not Found

Abstract

Needs analysis is often treated as diagnosis: learners are assumed to have pre-existing language deficits, analysts measure gaps, and curricula repair them. This chapter argues that this metaphor is inadequate for many contemporary English for Specific Purposes (ESP) programs because what counts as a “need” is often an institutional outcome stabilized through negotiation among stakeholders with unequal authority under constraints of accreditation, auditability, timetabling, staffing, and employability discourse. It proposes Negotiated Needs Analysis (NNA), a decision-centered framework that turns needs analysis into transparent curriculum governance. NNA operationalizes needs analysis as an auditable dossier that records who authorizes priorities, which target practices are selected, what evidence counts, what trade-offs are made, how contestation is handled, and when revisions must occur. The chapter supplies reporting standards and templates that make the inference from evidence to curriculum explicit, defensible, and comparable across programs.